‘Split’

In 2002, Newsweek touted M. Night Shyamalan as the next Stephen Spielberg, “Hollywood’s hottest new storyteller.”

This was around the time of the release of  “Signs,” Shyamalan’s deeply effective, layered, and intimate take on extraterrestrial invasions and crop circle conspiracies—it was also to be his final film to reach both critical and box office success, which after “The Sixth Sense” (iconic) and “Unbreakable” (ahead of its time) had become the norm for the young Philadelphian filmmaker.

After “Signs” came the jarring stumble of flop after critical flop, and as much as I myself enjoyed the much reviled “The Village,” even this lifelong Shyamalan fan couldn’t quite get on board with the pretentiousness of “Lady in the Water,” the awkward silliness of “The Happening,” and… well, I took a hard pass on his big-budget blockbusters “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth.”

Shyamalan never belonged in the arena of action flicks and summer blockbusters in the first place. That’s why the scaled down, found-footage creep-fest “The Visit” led to his first critical success (albeit, a minor one) in more than a decade. This restraint in ambition and scope is also what makes his newest film “Split” so enjoyable.

“Split” concerns the kidnapping of three young girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, and Jessica Sula) by a man who suffers from multiple-personality disorder—to be precise, Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) has 23 split personalities, including a 9-year-old boy named Hedwig, a British woman named Patricia, and a psychopath with OCD named Dennis.

The girls are held in an undisclosed underground facility and frequently tormented and bewildered by their captor’s behavior. Crumb’s various personalities share the duty of warning the girls of an impending 24^th personality they call ”The Beast,” which they say demands a human sacrifice (or three). Crumb becomes a ticking time bomb, and as the girls try to form an escape plan, Crumb’s psychiatrist, Dr. Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), attempts to piece together his crumbling mental state and increasingly bizarre conduct, and reach the real Kevin hidden beneath his cluster of personalities (Dr. Fletcher refers to them as “the horde”) before it is too late and “The Beast” emerges to claim his victims.

In many ways, “Split” is classic Shyamalan in the way it explores big ideas on a noticeably small scale. In the same quiet, quaint way “The Sixth Sense” explored the afterlife, “Unbreakable” explored the possibility of real-life comic book heroes and villains, and “Signs” explored a global alien invasion, “Split” takes a fairly standard sort of thriller and suspense premise, and gradually evolves it into something darker, and more surprising, peculiar and far-reaching in its scope than expected. It’s a cleverer script than Shyamalan has written in a while, a slow burn that consistently ratchets up the tension and peels away the layers of its mystery without ever really succumbing to the “Shyamalan twist ending” trope for which the writer/director has become known over the years.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some silliness scattered throughout “Split.” There is a good bit of pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo and sometimes some frustrating character behavior but, fortunately, veteran actress Betty Buckley is able to deliver much of the “scientific” material in the film with complete graveness and sincerity. I suspect her role in the movie will become more tragic on repeat viewings—I can’t reveal why, but trust me: she absolutely nails the role.

Casting McAvoy was a Shyamalan coup, as the versatile English actor is game when it comes to playing a guy with 20+ personalities. His stellar performance also helps to save the film from diving into complete nonsense. Taylor-Joy, who starred in last year’s brilliant gothic horror film “The Witch,” also brings a vital urgency to her character, whose development features what is certainly the darkest story thread Shyamalan has ever written.

While “Split” isn’t quite up to par with Shyamalan’s best work, it shows that he is still capable of making enjoyably quirky stylistic and storytelling choices while also showing restraint. With a knockout of an ending that will lead true Shyamalan fans to rejoice, “Split” is the closest thing yet to a full Shyamalan renaissance, a definite reminder and revitalization of the promise he once showed with his earlier films.

★★★ (out of 4)

‘The Avengers: Age of Ultron’ & ‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”

Marvel’s on a roll, and building quite an impressive cinematic universe. Problem is, with Joss Whedon’s lumbering, occasionally remarkable follow-up to “The Avengers,” this universe with all of its heroes, villains and middlemen, appears to have outgrown the scope of even a two-and-a-half hour movie. “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” feels like a 13 hour season of television crammed into a 2.5 hour slot, and that is perhaps the most damaging quality of the movie — it all feels both rushed and endless.

“Age of Ultron” opens with a bang, as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) are simultaneously taking down bad guys and trying to infiltrate a Russian compound to retrieve the stolen scepter of Loki (played in previous Marvel movies by  Tom Hiddleston). It’s a fun sequence, very show-offy, but to the point and reminiscent of a James Bond opener in the way it jumps right into the action.

The Avengers succeed in retrieving the scepter, which Tony “Iron Man” Stark discovers contains the key to a new form of artificial intelligence that could protect the world from all future extraterrestrial attacks. With Bruce “the Hulk” Banner’s assistance, he jump starts the Ultron program, which leads to the accidental creation of one of the Avengers’ most formidable foes, Ultron (voiced by James Spader), a giant artificially intelligent robot which mayhem and madness on his mind.

Now look: There is a lot of fun to be had here in the “Age of Ultron.” Highlights include the gang taking turns trying to pick up Thor’s hammer (and the solid pay off when, later in the movie, one particular individual does so without effort or thought), the Hulk vs. Iron Man, the short appearances of Don Cheadle as Stark’s buddy Rhodey, a.k.a. War Machine, and the two new super-powered characters, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who play a big part in Ultron’s plan to take down the world.

But after James Gunn’s surprisingly excellent  and enduring “Guardians of the Galaxy,” what might be the best of the Marvel movies next to John Favreau’s “Iron Man,” and the grave and grounded “Daredevil” series on Netflix, “Age of Ultron” feels out of touch and tired. For all of its sound, fury and quips, it never really leaves an impression, nor does it cohere as well as it would had it been produced as a series or mini-series. There comes a point where it’s just too much to carry, too complicated to juggle around, and too dull to even care about. Whedon has bitten off more than he can chew, which is a shame because he’s delivered in his work so often in the past (we’ll forgive “Alien Resurrection”). It’s just not in the cards this time around, and despite a strong cast and some fantastic sequences that really do bring the comics to life, “Age of Ultron” can’t pull it together for long enough at a time to make the mark.

★★1/2 (out of four)

Brett Morgan’s documentary, “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” is an incredible visual  and aural experience that throws us head first into the mind of the Nirvana front man, and avoids almost all of the conventions we have seen before in bio-documentaries. I hesitate to even call this a bio-doc, as it is less interested in telling the standard “life and times” story of its subject, then it is in exploring who Kurt Cobain was from the inside-out. It’s an intense, unbalanced ride through Cobain’s music, art handwritten journals, and audio, much of which has never been released until now.

That’s because this is the first authorized documentary made about Cobain. It features interviews with his surviving family, his ex-wife and fellow rock-star Courtney Love, and was produced by his daughter with Love, Frances Cobain.

“Montage of Heck” goes through the entire arc of Cobain’s childhood, teenage years, his success with Nirvana, and his death. It’s a tragic 27-year lifespan that cannot be digested easily, even in a documentary film. Through some of the coolest, most visceral editing I’ve ever seen, Morgan and his co-editor Joe Beshenkovsky manage to communicate and capture a visually incredible representation of Cobain’s anxieties, dreams and nightmares. With this film, they allow us to experience, at least partially, the pain, genius, and conflict that this guy felt over the course of his life by animating his art, and by animating audio recordings of his voice into complete scenes.

Variations on his music, including stringed arrangements and original recordings, combined with the visual poetry that his art, brought to life by Morgan’s editing, make “Montage of Heck” a documentary experience unlike any other. This documentary had an impact on me, as someone who started listening to Nirvana at a young age — I absorbed it through something like osmosis from my brother’s speakers at first, and then listened to their “MTV: Unplugged” album for the first time on my own, and that was that. There’s some kind of power in his songs that continues to speak to people long after his death, and that power comes through clearly here.

★★★1/2 (out of four)